Cases in Camera Stellata_, 1593 to
1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon,
F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.

{411} See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to
the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of
Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at
Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of _As You
Like It_. The countess is said to have added, 'We have the man
Shakespeare with us.' No tangible evidence of the existence of the
letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an
ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players
visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court
temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were
ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance
there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the
King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the
Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known:
she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of
mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the man Shakespeare.'
Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London
picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third
Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was
represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines
from Shakespeare's Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words
'Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603' The ink and handwriting
are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes
of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some
persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait
and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the
inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a
clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.

{414} Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after
the portrait by Mytens.

{415} It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to
consider seriously the suggestion that the 'dark lady' of the sonnets was
Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady,
who was at one time Pembroke's mistress and bore hi